Crack the Spine - Issue 136

Crack the Spine

Literary magazine

Issue 136

Issue 136 January 28, 2015 Edited by Kerri Farrell Foley Collection copyright 2015 by Crack the Spine

Cover Art: “Into the Ocean� by Kitty Oberly Kitty Oberly is a current student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to or creating music, learning about the world, wishing she could make a million graphic novels, trying to write and talking to animals. Her art can be seen anywhere from schools, art galleries and other planets.

CONTENTS

Cecile Barlier Resilience

Tim Suermondt They’re Off s

Linda Carela

The Enlightenment of Mr. Yunior Contreras

Paul Hansom Instrumentality

Justin J. Murphy

italy, the end, november

Jocelyn Locksley

Layover

Cecile Barlier Resilience

Snap. That was the noise that woke left. You hesitated. If you looked at the you up at 2 a.m. as if you really heard it. Snap. Or more like sn_p, with an absent vowel, as if the “a” had been plucked out—a beheaded word.

Something missing. You didn’t think “missing.” Missing was what you detected with your arm extended across the space next to you; your husband’s body not there and your lips flabbily tensed at the corners like a rope. Snap. You weren’t in your bed where you were supposed to be, and you couldn’t identify the noise. But you could not pretend that it was not there.

You were exhausted. Your heart was beating faster. It was there: the noise.

It wasn’t your heartbeat.

It could have been ten minutes or an hour. You couldn’t tell because you didn’t look at the clock. Not after you’d seen the blue two-zero-zero glowing in the dark earlier somewhere to your

clock, it would tell you what time it was; it would tell you how long you had been listening, how long you had been not moving in that place that wasn’t your bed. Worse: it would tell you how much longer the night could last.

Still, you opened your eyes big in the dark. That was the only thing you could lift: your eyelids. Strange to sense them light as feathers when everything else was swallowed by gravity. You rolled your eyes all over in the darkness.

Super fast. You stretched your eyes in their sockets. You were stretching. You would almost laugh if the panic wasn’t hitting you.

You needed to focus. On anything but the noise. You focused on your need to urinate, the need to stand up and go to the bathroom. You needed to empty yourself of the very last drop.

You sat. It was too much to be sitting.

You swooned.

Night still. The noise was gone. You were so scared. You were parched. In the semi-darkness you could see a glass of water glowing beside you. Now it took you less than thirty seconds to realize where you were. Lying on your kitchen counter, your head close to the sink. A glass of water next to you. You didn’t know why you were there. You didn’t know how. Everything else seemed normal.

You were in your beach house, lying on your kitchen counter. This was a fact. Tangible. Outside the ocean was lapping the sand on the beach. You were so scared. You were strong enough to sit on the counter this time and drink the water. You felt dizzy and terrified. There was a drug in the water. A drug that made you pass out again. Pass out cold on your kitchen counter.

Awake again. You couldn’t breathe because you were under water. Only

your head was under water. You lifted your head up and bent your neck as hard as you could. You knocked something hard with the back of your head, and you coughed up all the water from your nostrils and your mouth.

You felt the influx of blood to your face.

You felt the pressure of the veins getting filled in and around your eyes.

You didn’t think. You were blank; without one single thought. That was almost comfortable: that blankness.

Strange to just be yourself in the moment. Detached from the moment.

Then a strong desire to remain in that void, which was a sure sign that you were snapping out of it.

No light. You didn’t see the water where your head had been. You felt its coldness like a mean ocean breeze. If you let your head down again, it would hit the water. You held your head high but not too high so it wouldn’t hit the hard thing behind you. You were trying to use your mind and what your senses told your mind despite the drugs. An

absurd thought floated up on you like a wreck across your skull. It brought you back fully to the terror—your random madness—the conjectures on what might be happening. It drove the hair on your skin up. For a brief moment you relapsed into the void.

Upon recovering, you tried to move your hands and bring them toward your torso so you could push yourself back and up. You could not. Something resisted against your wrists: a layer of tight cloth. You could not move your hands and arms more than a quarter of an inch. They were tied against your hips. Your upper body was bound in a cloth. It drove your heart to a drumbeat. Thump-thump. Thumpthump. You could smell the sourness from your sweat. You had to leave that place.

You bent your right leg, and it fell over a ledge. You looked frantically for a surface to land on with your foot. You could hear yourself breathing. You could hear your heart beating. Could

not find the floor with your foot. You threw your hips toward the ledge. In doing so, and because you were bound from the waist up, you looked like a fish somersaulting on the deck of a boat; eyes like saucers averted inward.

Both legs were now overboard, and you were cautiously searching the darkness with your feet. You were sliding more and more over the ledge, and soon the portion of your body over would outweigh the rest, and you would topple into a dark hole.

As you fell, your outstretched feet finally touched something solid: a floor—cold, smooth, and wet. Tiles.

Your kitchen floor. You could tell from the temperature and the pace at which your feet encountered the end of a tile and the small fracture covered with grout. The skin on your feet knew that floor. You had had happy breakfasts in that kitchen. You had had arguments and bouts of melancholy. You had cut your index finger once when slicing ham. Now, in the same kitchen and in

complete darkness, drugged out of your senses, you were staggering, shoeless, toward the exit with your upper body mummified. Something knocked somewhere. Your body shivered under the sound of the blow.

It sounded like a bird had flown into a window.

You were taking small steps, counting tiles, feeling the gaps with your big toes. Take your time. You don’t want to stumble and fall on your face with your arms bound. You were proceeding based on your memorized kitchen geography. Toward the door.

You did not think about what could be behind the door. You only wanted to think: door. Door. Exit. You had counted ten tiles so far. There should be another ten or so and then the pantry and then, at an angle, the small portion of the wall that led to the door.

Another five tiles along that wall.

Maybe. Fifteen tiles total. You had fifteen tiles to go and you’d be there.

What you would do at the door was

another matter altogether. One step at a time. Talking to yourself. Silently.

Saying it was all right, you would get out of here. You would be safe. Go on.

You had progressed through five more tiles, and you felt your hair in your face: wet and dripping. Suddenly you were annoyed by that fact. Your wet hair was a hindrance. A stigma.

You shook your head front and back to clear it out. It made your neck crack.

You wanted to have your face free of hair so you could see clearly, even if there was nothing to see in the darkness. You breathed more freely.

You straightened your back, pushed your shoulders out against the cloth.

You resumed your steps. You felt a bit bigger.

As you reached the pantry, you remembered the light switch. You fumbled across the wall with your arm, through the cloth. You felt it poking into your skin. You lowered yourself to have it at face level. You had the switch near your mouth. You touched it with

your lips. You’d lift it up with your teeth. That was the plan. No. Changed your mind. You stopped. Squatted under the switch. Your lower back balanced against the wall.

It was as if the space had bent very slightly around you. The temperature seemed on an imperceptible rise. The wall wasn’t as cold as you had remembered. An intuition had turned you into a sponge of senses. You were absorbing every change, however microscopic. There. The air was quickly filling up with a certain thereness.

A smell. That was it. A sulfuric smell assaulted you. You did not know a smell could be assaulting. You had assumed smells were progressive. A smell would build up to an intolerance level. But this one had exploded to your nostrils. A big bang of rotten eggs.

It had stopped you in your endeavor to turn the light on. It was making you sick—your stomach suddenly much higher inside you, much closer to your

thoracic cage, an impediment to the work of your lungs. You tried breathing with your mouth. Breathe in. Pause.

Breathe out. You let your shoulders sink away from your neck. The effort you put into controlling your breathing was making you more relaxed. Your abdominal wall felt softer, lower. You went on for a while like that. It might have been a minute, perhaps even two, before you breathed from your nose again and recognized the smell. You could no longer doubt it. Gas. Your kitchen was filling up with gas. From the stove. That was the source. You were sure of that. The burners had been turned open but not lit. It was an old stove: a fancy Italian professional model. It had no shut-off safety device.

You had spent months locating a vendor that carried that brand and that particular model. It wasn’t exaggerated to say that you loved that stove.

The question slowly crossed your mind as to whether the decrease in oxygen levels would make you even

more tired than you were now and whether there would be an explosion or just a gradual descent into unconsciousness. And tired you were.

So calm. As if you were the witness of the events, not a participant. In the dark you were vaguely smiling, like a teenager watching a scary movie, outgrowing your own fear. There was this interval where you felt a certain air of unrealism in the moment. It was brief. Because the gas levels must have been increasing rapidly. But it might have been long. For how long does it take to fill a large kitchen with gas flowing from only four burners?

A flash of light interrupted your reverie. At first you couldn’t tell the origin of the light. It was a grazing light, caressing your feet. Naked feet.

You thought, It’s someone. Here. To finish the job, to be finished. Someone with small feet and short toes. And then you recognized them as your own, and it made your eyes water. You had a sudden gush of tenderness for your

feet. The favorite part of your body. It gave you stamina. You followed the light to its source: under the door. A light was lit on the other side of the door, and the gap at the bottom was letting it in. You wondered how much of the gas would flow out of the kitchen through that gap. You shivered, thinking that if the levels had been right, the spark from operating the light switch above your head would have triggered an explosion.

At that point you faced an insoluble dilemma. The stove was on the other side of the kitchen; opposite from the door to which you were so close now.

Door. Or stove. You could head for the door, or you could make your way to the stove and try to stop the burners.

Before you could prolong this thought, the light around you got brighter. At first you couldn’t tell its source. You could just see more of your own body—your ankles, your shins, your knees. You could see the cloth strips wrapped tightly and

methodically around your hips, the bluish tip of your fingers bulging out of them. You made a mental note of what it was. Absorbent gauze: the type you used when you changed dressings on your patients. A ton of it in your bathroom. Must’ve been your gauze used to tie you up—a gigantic dressing.

Your own gauze, see?

And gas. You followed the light to its source: a fissure. The door to the hallway was now slightly open. The light was coming on all sides of it, diffusing a nasty glow on things. There was no time. You started crawling toward the light. It felt like instinct.

Inside the gut. Faster. Like a soldier in the mud but without elbows.

Backward. Toward the door. You pushed yourself backward against the floor with your feet. You pushed yourself against the wall. You grunted.

You cursed. You moaned. You pushed.

Faster. You had one chance only. You scratched your skin on the edge of the tiles. It felt like you were crawling on a

carrot shredder. How many tiles would you cover with bits of your skin? Your heart was faster again, and you could only see what was directly in front of you. You had tunnel vision; you were locked in your own sensory tunnel.

You needed out toward the light, past the door and into the hallway. Your legs were shaking as they pushed you.

You were so slow. So slow. The door to the hallway was ridiculously far. How many times had you gone that distance in just three seconds? A few pushes and you’d be there. That was all. It was like childbirth—one more push, please.

You almost shut the door with your head on the last push. But then you used your head as a lever to get in the door. It wouldn’t open more than barely the width of your head. You had your head out but the rest still in. For a second you thought, That’s it. I’m done.

Finished. I tried.

You wondered if, in a sick way, you had not wanted this for yourself, called it upon you. Which made you grow

frantically mad, and you struggled to turn sideways and force your shoulders through the opening. As you managed to get yourself through to your hips, the rest of your body followed easily. A half-formed thought of joy rushed to your mind. And the absurdity of it hit you nearly as much as its strength. You were about to yell, to cheer for yourself. You opened your mouth wide.

The blast in the kitchen shut the door behind you. In the hallway the space contracted. The walls were curving inside. The air got denser, opaque like ground glass. Things collided. The air merged with the noise and the absence of it. There was no telling. No separating. No words. That was exactly it. The hallway and all that was in it, including you, were crashing into a very precise, wordless mass. The extreme speed of the explosion pushed everything down and in. You were flattened like a pancake against the floor. You were the floor. Boom. In your

flattened state, time started floating.

One—the little Mexican painting on the wall falling noiselessly like a lethargic autumn leaf. Two—bits of glass from the frame dawdling up toward your ankles. Three—drops of blood forming on your legs like morning dew. And loss of hearing, but that loss was also accompanied by an extreme clarity of the mind. You were able to follow yourself in the aftermath of the explosion. You saw yourself duck under the semi-circle console table.

You saw yourself draw your legs inward against your chest. You saw yourself tuck your head between your knees. Waiting.

Pause.

There was a blank space at the end.

After everything got so rushed and slowed; eventually it stopped.

Stop.

Then the phone rang.

And after you lifted yourself back up from under the console in the hallway.

After you cut the absorbent gauze

against the stair metal railing. After you broke the door down into the living room. After you looked for the cordless everywhere as it continued to ring. After you found it next to the TV remotes. You pressed on the receiver like one holds a hand above a cliff.

White semi-circles drawn on your fingernails. The receiver was holding your hand. The receiver was holding you, waking from the trance, transfixed into the possibility of who was calling.

Tim Suermondt They’re Off s

The latest book I’m reading flies out of my hands, out one open window, disappearing down the street ripe with cars and pedestrians, browning leaves on the trees.

“Books always fly out of your hands,” my wife says, concerned, as if she meant like my life flying away.

“Let’s see if we can track it down,” I say, “find out where they’ve all gone, must be to a place the size of stadiums.”

She gets her coat and tosses me my shoes, combs her hair quickly in front of the parlor mirror. “Can you imagine,” she says, “the look on their covers when they see you coming?”

Linda Carela The Enlightenment of Mr. Yunior Contreras

Some men live their lives with the the future, never anticipated it, indeed thought of death ever present. They consult medical doctors, astrologers, and life insurance agents, buy cars they can’t afford, figuring they might die before the first payment is due, and have affairs with other men’s wives.

Other men live their lives pushing death to the darkest, rarely glimpsed corners of the mind. They drive without seat belts, eat the fried meat patties from the street vendor, and have affairs with other men’s wives.

Mr. Yunior Contreras, however, lived neither in denial nor in contemplation.

Death just never occurred to him as a possibility. In fact, Yunior lived his life as if he held the winning lottery ticket and he only had to figure out where to cash the damn thing.

Yunior truly lived from moment to moment, seeking pleasure always, avoiding pain. He never planned for

never even thought about it. Perhaps this was infantile, a regression to the days of looking only to be fed, changed, and coddled, or perhaps, to give our hero more credit, Yunior believed that he had absolutely no control over the future, and to live each day as he did with a beer in one hand and a woman in the other was the only sensible way.

Nevertheless, all this living and no planning had brought Yunior to a crisis that even he found hard to ignore. His second eviction notice had just been slid under the apartment door. Yunior had been relaxing in his brown vinyl recliner when he heard the swish of the paper. He went to the hallway and stared at it. It was a white envelope. It was taped closed.

He called out, “Rosita, Rosita. Come here, my dream, my love.”

Now Yunior had a predilection for

fat women. Not jeans-a-bit-too-tight, little-thick-around-the-middle women.

Not even round, jolly, double-chinned women. But huge, take-two-seats-onthe-bus, 350-pound babes. Although his somewhat unusual taste narrowed the population of women acceptable to him, when Yunior found an object of desire, or a Big Mama as he called them all, she was enthusiastically and exclusively his. His current Big Mama, Rosita, was the sixth in the line who had borne him children, fifteen children overall.

Yunior leaned back against the wall, placed his arm around Rosita, and pointed at the envelope. “My darling, could you bend over and pick that up?�

Contrary to appearance, Yunior did not make this request out of laziness, although he did indeed have a deep reservoir of laziness, which he dipped into and drank from whenever the opportunity for inactivity presented itself. But this time, it was not laziness, but desire that motivated Yunior, that

taut ache known as horniness. Yunior suspected that the white envelope would bring some inconvenience, perhaps even hardship, we might say misery, but Yunior was more optimistic than that, to their lives. After all, eviction was a road he had traveled before, and Yunior did have a bit of a memory, if no forethought. Therefore, he was determined to wring every drop of pleasure from the present moment, and seeing Rosita bend over, that enormous ass thrust skyward, those pendulous breasts hanging toward the floor, was an enjoyment not to be forsaken under any circumstances.

Rosita was a good-hearted woman always ready to oblige her muchbeloved Yunior. And she was ridiculously young, just turned nineteen, and had a weakness, common to many young women—the desire to be admired. So she gave her husband a sly little smile, hitched up her nightgown, and bent over. Of

course, it was no ladylike, doctorrecommended bend at the knees, but a bouncing, touch-your-toes stretch, and she stayed in that position for a few moments, fingering the envelope as if it were a slippery eel that eluded her grasp.

Yunior drew his breath in sharply and made a loud slurping noise. It amazed and delighted him the way Rosita’s backside could obscure the entire doorway. And it was all his.

Yunior slumped back against the wall and let his heart, and that other somewhat lower organ, throb with gratitude at such abundance.

When Rosita finally caught her fish and straightened upward, her face was flushed and she was panting slightly.

Yunior took the envelope and flung it to the table, where it slid off and hit the floor again. Rosita had seen the delight on Yunior’s face and assumed that he had flung the envelope to the floor on purpose, and she hitched up her nightgown for one more round of this

novel, but somewhat exhausting new form of foreplay.

However, Yunior’s pint-sized capacity for preliminaries had reached its limit. He was chock full and about to brim over. He caught Rosita in midbend, and he guided her in that position to the living room, where he draped her over the back of the sofa, spreading her legs, placing her arms just so, all done with a gentle precision as one might arrange a pyramid of tin cans before shooting them all down. It was over rather quickly, and perhaps the physical pleasure for Rosita was not so great, although the sofa was soft, and other than the discomfort of her head bobbing in midair, she certainly felt no pain. Furthermore, when she backed away from the sofa and saw Yunior sprawled on the floor, exhausted and satisfied, eyes half closed, still breathing heavily, she felt something akin to power. I did that, she thought to herself, and she stepped over Yunior’s prone body with a smile

and almost a chuckle.

Shortly after this amorous encounter, Yunior and Rosita’s two babies woke up. Born within the same year, PeteRose Contreras was not quite two, and SteveGarvey Contreras had just turned one. With fifteen children in his progeny, thirteen of them boys, Yunior had run out of Paco and Pedro type names long ago and had sought inspiration in baseball. Neither baby talked, but both toddled around the apartment in a vigilant search for anything that could be toppled or tasted. Yunior, still on the floor, watched his sons’ wobbly, fat legs, listened to their strange jabbers, marveled at their busy bee industry, and couldn’t imagine how they might ever become men. How would the smooth cheeks ever sprout hair? How would the chubby limbs grow long enough to stretch out on a recliner?

How would the high-pitched, singsong voices ever become commanding, “Yo woman, where is my shirt?” voices? It

didn’t seem possible, or at least not likely. So Yunior did what he always did in the face of the incomprehensible.

He rolled onto his stomach and fell asleep, facedown on the musty carpet.

Yunior awoke to a screech that made him sit bolt upright. PeteRose had found the white envelope, the eviction notice that had been flung to the floor, and it dangled from his mouth like a slipper from a dog’s. SteveGarvey wanted a taste but was thwarted by his brother, who jerked his head away and turned his back.

SteveGarvey screeched again and then stamped his chubby, bare foot on the floor and wailed in frustration.

“Attaboy, Junior. Let ’em know what you want,” Yunior pounded his own fist on the floor and encouraged his youngest son. Despite their unique names, Yunior called all of his sons Junior. He might be accused of megalomania, but really, calling his children by his own name was done not for self-aggrandizement, but for the

sake of easy recall, tip-of-the-tongue readiness. After all, was HankAaron the third son from his second wife or was he the second son from his third wife?

Who could keep track? Simplicity ruled. They were all his. They were all Junior.

“Give me that nasty thing, you bonehead,” Yunior said and pulled the crumpled, soggy envelope from PeteRose’s mouth.

Yunior flung the envelope to the table for the second time that morning, but this time, possibly due to its sodden state, it stuck to the shiny varnish and stayed there. Yunior looked at his name typed on the front of the envelope in crisp black letters: RAFAEL HIPOLITO MADERA CONTRERAS. Yunior’s mother, a silly, romantic girl of fourteen when Yunior was born, had her own delusions of grandeur and named her firstborn son as if he were a general standing tall in uniform, bronze medals glinting in the tropical sun. His father sensibly

nicknamed him Yunior, and so he was known ever after. No one even remembered that he was once called something else.

But there staring Yunior in the face was this other name, this evidence that he was really someone else, something other than a man with endless debts and an ailing liver. At that moment, Hope, yes, Hope, that wicked goddess who despite her benevolent reputation is the mother of all delusion, wormed her way into Yunior’s thoughts. Maybe it wasn’t an eviction notice. Maybe it was good news. Maybe…it was money.

With this in mind, Yunior reached out to grab the envelope, to slit it open and let its contents pour out and face the light of day. But then he stopped, as a man who has already sharpened the knife and begun to draw it over his wrist might stop.

Instead he called out, “Rosita, where is my food? A man needs to eat, you know.”

Rosita was in the kitchen, trying to

prepare lunch. She had several pots on the stove, the water running from the faucet, and the refrigerator door open as well as several of the cabinets. She had laid out on the counter: onions and garlic, cilantro and olives, a couple of cans of beans and one of tomato paste, a sack of cornmeal, six plantains, a hunk of dried salt cod, an avocado, a large family-sized pack of chicken wings, and an open bag of onion potato chips. She stood in the midst of all this food and had no idea what to do next.

Yunior walked into the kitchen singing out, “Hey good-looking, what you got cooking?” in Spanish, which meant the words didn’t rhyme and there were far too many syllables for the tune.

Rosita put her hands to her head and grabbed fistfuls of hair. “I’m trying…but…but you’re bothering…and…and the babies…they don’t keep quiet…and, and…this food…and this stove. I mean look at it.

No one can cook on this piece of crap,”

she half screamed, half sobbed.

Now Rosita had a laugh and a desire to please that would delight most any man, but what Rosita lacked (even more than brains, which quite frankly she didn’t have in abundance) was imagination. Beyond her was the ability to dream or visualize how the raw ingredients turned into the finished product. It was unfathomable.

How did that first stealthy romp on her mother’s couch turn into PeteRose?

How did a bag of yellow powder turn into corn bread? It was really the same question, and Rosita didn’t have a clue.

She was blindfolded, flailing about with a donkey’s tail. Furthermore, she had no girlfriends, no sisters, neither the blood nor the soul variety, not even a friendly aunt who could have shown her the ropes, who could have drawn the pictures, who could have conjured the visions, or at least could have pointed out the donkey’s ass. No, Rosita was alone in the male wilderness, alone with only her

tremendous boobs keeping her afloat on the sea of testosterone.

Under normal circumstances, Yunior, confronted with Rosita’s tirade, would have fled. Hat in hand, money in pocket, slam of the door. In the face of any and all conflict, that was his preferred modus operandi. But on this day, still enthralled with his belief in his imminent good fortune waiting in a white envelope on the table, he did not curse the likes of a woman who could not take care of a hardworking man. He did not grab his last $10 and walk out the door, although he did imagine he could smell the cuchifritos on the corner wafting in through the open window. He stayed put for a moment.

And in that moment of stillness, something happened. Yunior saw Rosita. He saw her smooth, golden moon face crumpled in pain. He saw her mouth, greasy with potato chip crumbs, twisted down. He saw her arms flapping helplessly at her sides in an attempt to explain, to justify her

incompetence.

Yunior went up to Rosita and pulled her hands out of her disheveled curls.

He touched her cheek, streaked from mascara-dirtied tears. He pulled her down and they sat there on the kitchen floor and shared the bag of onion potato chips. The babies, content with their bottles of milk and a box of animal crackers, tumbled in and out of their laps. Rosita leaned against Yunior, and Yunior stretched his arm all the way around her large set of shoulders. Her hair, ringlets of auburn that hung to her waist, partly covered her face. Yunior reached out with his other hand to brush it away, but the wiry hair snarled around his fingers.

He had to get closer to detach himself, without tugging, without pulling. He was an inch from Rosita’s skin, from the translucent down that covered her soft cheek. She had a warm smell like a sleep-crumpled bed. He inhaled deeply and Yunior felt a pull, an ache near his chest. It was tenderness, affection,

perhaps even love. But to Yunior love was a pump it, twist it, grind it till it pops kind of thing. So this, he knew not what to call. But it was somehow better than a hard-on. Better mostly because Yunior didn’t have to do anything. No assembly required. He just had to sit back and let the warmth wash over him. And the warmth calmed his jumpiness (No food, past noon, Gotta Go, Woman), soothed his anxiety (No money, too many kids, Gotta Go, Woman), neutralized his need for constant domination (Listen to me…I…Gotta…Go…Woman), and made him sit still. So Yunior sat there, perhaps not quite a Buddha under his tree, actually more like a neutered tomcat on a windowsill, but it was the same peace, the same glimpse of understanding, and it was a moment Yunior would always remember.

Paul Hansom Instrumentality

I see things as they really are, without secrets, sly duplicities, undisguised by propriety and the belief that when one speaks, one speaks in code. I see the yawning nothing behind it all.

And I resolve myself to silence.

Deeper.

Quieter.

Until I am the mossy hush of a well, a single drop of water falling every thousand years.

I will become chilled peace.

This is the simple truth of my condition, and of all conditions. Sixty years ago, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the host of fleeing Frankfurters, stood exactly here dreaming of American salvation, Nazi destruction, smiling in the rain of Thousand Bomber Raids, the sun sinking into dry Topanga Canyon. Proof they were not mad.

Now the sun sinks the same.

I have swam ten lengths in the pool and sit in a garden chair watching the dull summer party.

What is going on?

I take a breath and flick the tireless ant off my leg, feel the sun warming my skin.

I have smiled all the smiles I know, have grinned every grin, frowned and nodded and listened until I am a wellrehearsed mask. I have said everything in the world, smart things, stupid things, profound things, hateful phrases, loving phrases, words that mean nothing yet pass for culture in this banal circulation.

Listen.

On the balcony, an exclusive chatting circle makes a fuss about the plastic cups, insist on using the stem-ware for their middling Chilean Merlot. And when Angela, the host, relents, they strike up a spirited drone over the

merits of lingerie outlets: Barney's or Sak's?

I leave my chair, clamber down, around and over the house-stilts, avoid the hair-filled coyote dung, weave into a child's playpen, buried in the flowering bushes. I find a swing rusted like an ancient statue, test the chains, and take a ride.

Angela follows me down, hidden behind alcohol.

She appears eager, earnest, her moon face matching my up-swing back-swing, chasing me with questions of casual sex, morality, the possibility of experiencing real pleasure.

"Tell me who," I ask, my feet in the sky.

"You know," she says.

"If I knew I wouldn't ask," swishing back behind her.

"You should know," she says.

"I don't know."

"I can't say," she laughs.

And so on, until I'm lost in her evasions, and she is frustrated but still

unwilling to clarify who she is really talking about.

"Just give me some words." I stop the swing in a puff of dust. "Any words," I say.

"Guilt and vulnerability," she replies.

I twist the chains into a knot and let myself go in a spin. I say dizzy things, telling her none of it makes a difference, that she shouldn’t moralize because it has no place within modernity. "It doesn't matter, Angela.

You hurt only yourself," I say. "You introduce pain where it's inappropriate."

"Oh wow," she says.

Oh wow I think, forming my mouth around the words in silence.

"We're two adults talking like teens," I say. "Which isn't necessarily bad." I begin to swing again.

"You're a guru," she insists, trying to flatter me, to keep me asking questions about her.

I keep swinging and listen to her leave.

"Goooooooooo-rooooooooooooooooo."

And I laugh. ~~~

In the kitchen I fix a char-scabbed hamburger and drink yellow beer.

A small, desperate crowd gathers around a man busily separating seeds and stems from his marijuana. He efficiently scoops it up with a credit card, neatly transferring it to a rolling paper without losing a shred. Within seconds he has produced a tight, perfect joint, that passes from mouth to mouth. They smoke, then smile at each other.

People leave their chairs, go nowhere in particular, roam the house.

Other people fill the empty chairs and look at the group greedily smoking and chuckling.

A dog named Theodor sits down next to me, I pat his head. He moves his mouth with wet jowl sounds, placing his cool nose in my palm. I pick up a

rubber ham-chop and throw it for him.

He lunges, grabs it, and it lets out a piercing squeak. Theodor runs away.

I see a book on Edward Hopper, decide not to open it because it demands to be opened. The book is too insistent on its alienation, a weak reflection of the real thing.

"Angela, why don't you play the piano?"

"God," she says. "That's so old fashioned. We should invite my Grandmother."

She laughs for someone else's benefit. I look over my shoulder but there is only us.

"It might be nice," I offer.

"I can only play TV tunes," she says.

"Which?"

"Not the full versions. Just snatches, you know?"

"Which?"

"I can't play," she says and leaves the room.

"That needn't matter," I call after her.

On the balcony, someone bangs the green chimes repeatedly, laughing to himself, re-performing a joke about accidentally banging the chimes over and over. ~~~

Mr. Kurtz is right -- never fight human impulse because that is all you are.

Always be native. Self control avoids recognizing what you achieve by being that person. You are like you to achieve a purpose -- understand that purpose, and you recognize the limits of that performance.

I suggest this to a friend.

"You're such a romantic," he says.

"Be reasonable. I just want you all dead. If I could erase you all, I wouldn't have to worry about who I was because. . . there would be no audience.

Don't you see that?"

He pauses in thought, calmly weighing my proposition, his eyes unfocused, glassy.

Suddenly I am in the bathroom

looking at my chlorinated hair, the skin peeling off my nose, a ring-rack in the shape of penitent hands. I see my mirrored face, hear the phrase "my face" echo behind it, and stare at the familiar image, framed.

Mr. Kurtz. . . .

I tear out a nose hair and return to the party.

"Why am I romantic?" I ask the friend.

He sighs, takes a long bubbly gulp of beer, setting the bottle down calmly.

"Because," he says, "you can't have an effective solution on your own. Not on an individual basis. You need to look at the mass."

"But I don't have the mass. I have me. That's it. I have my individual wiring which happens to be stretched out across the mass."

He nods at my point and brings his finger tips together like the ring rack.

"We are more alike than unlike," he says. "Your needs happen to be the same as other people's, as mine. And

all we have to do is make that clear."

"To?" "Everybody."

"And then. . .?" I ask.

"And then we'll know what it is we want, where our interests lie. Then we can be alive, rather than always pretending to be alive."

"But where do we start?"

"I don't know," he says. ~~~

I drive home listening to the radioshiver on the AM frequency, numb. The empty road enters my car, passes through me, leaving me alone in the immense night of the Twentieth Century.

I fully understand what he said, but I know my own words carry a truth too obvious to acknowledge. I might be afraid of myself.

I stare up at a massive billboard stretched across the street, announcing the arrival of a new retail kid on the block. A baby sprawls on the sixty foot

space, happily pre-programmed, fully integrated into the coming culture.

What would it be like to avoid seduction into preordained fantasy?

What would my own needs look like?

Home, on my sofa, I reach out to the centerfold. Her body is arched at an angle putting her anus, vagina, and mouth on the same level. Oiled, shockingly lit, she is reduced to a cipher, a neat sum of her holes.

She is a woman only by implication.

I dial the number at the bottom of the page and give my credit card details.

"Hello," I say.

"Hiiiiiiii," she croons.

"I saw your picture and I thought I'd ask if you're really committed to what you are becoming."

There is a short pause and she says "Uhhh. . . ."

"That's not a trick question. Why do you do what you do? What are you about?"

Her pause is longer and she hangs up.

Of course.

I understand this, tune my radio to the station of historical emotions, listen to the endless fascination and preoccupation with sex, and the dogged fear of loneliness. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, all these songs pit romantic insistence against catastrophic, primitive urges, neatly packaged into three minutes.

But I know how this logic works itself out. I know the ending.

The very fact I am alive long after the actual, physical recording itself, means I am the living embodiment of its implied assumption.

I am an icon of this triumphant culture, living proof of the death of myself.

THIS has defeated Fascism, outspent Communism, and is now simply, perhaps even beautifully, the most powerful cultural system that will ever

exist.

History has stopped in my living room because it no longer matters.

I listen to another song, think about life before rock and roll, know that was sixty years ago, though I live it and experience it as a perpetual now: The Ford Motor Company provides an assembly-line understanding of the world, from the production of completed cars and trucks every fifteen seconds, to the smooth-rolling smoke-stack crematoria of Eastern Europe. Fired by nods at efficiency, cost-effectiveness, belief, opinion, the common good, expert solutions to pressing problems, the simplification of life through the suffocation by luxury -- then is now. Seconds later in my mind two atom bombs explode in the race to end a war so the next one can begin. We destroy the Japanese to make them in our image.

These things happen in a world as real as this one -- only now they are quaint morality tales for the ways we

don't want to live.

It makes perfect sense, but I'm saddened by the limits of my analysis.

My bones sag into the sofa, into the cheap fabric cover. I suck in air, puff out air, listen for the steady pull of blood in my delivery system. I am the most sophisticated organism on the planet. I resolve myself.

To silence.

Justin J. Murphy italy, the end, november

like a ghost upon a dying snowflake she vanished within a passing train riding the tracks west following the point where the sky meets the land with the tip of her finger

Jocelyn Locksley Layover

Stomach

clenching empty, eyes stinging wet, she knelt, vomiting, in a washroom stall at Trudeau Airport.

Ham sandwich and two cups of black coffee that she’d drunk without tasting, slipping bitter down her throat at the last table in the back of the café fifteen minutes before, now burning, forcing its way back.

Every heave of her shoulders threw her hair into her face even as she tore at it half blind, waist-length tangles of black with the broken bright shine of chemical damage. The soiled locks she held apart and rinsed at the sink, but still the water left behind a vinegar stench. Better to cut them off instead, but where in an airport to find scissors, a razor? None to be had.

With wetted rough paper she wiped the feel of grit from her knees, still the familiar faint ache from tile against bone, and shook out the ruffles of her

skirt. Hair braided, pinned up with hairpins from her handbag but the prickling sting of her scalp was too heavy, so she slid the pins back out to let it drop, hang, a thick black snake down her back, wound over her shoulder and still too much weight, dead albatross grown one with living flesh.

The hot tingle at the base of her neck remained even tipping her head back against airplane seat, faintly oily upholstery tickling with its miteinfested cilia at her skin. Once again following countless times before, her fingers slipped into her handbag to reaffirm the crisp crinkle of banknotes tucked into the stiffer stock of her passport cover, but too soon encountered the hated dust of newsprint against her fingertips, the rolled Gazette she’d bought before the gate, and recoiled from the English

words. It was English she’d have to read where she’d landed herself now that she’d lost the game, slipped down snakes into the States, soon to be delivered by Air Canada into the arms of an American grandmother she’d never met, then kept down by an imaginary line, manmade parallel.

Manmade as it may be, it was no cartographer’s fault if she never went back. She’d known it anyway the moment her father had handed her the boarding pass, one-way ticket to the south beyond the border. Folded now still from the crisp quick slide of his fingers she found it nestled at the bottom of her bag with powder compact and stray hairpins. His face had been blank like the eyes in a marble bust. Not that it made much difference. He hadn’t looked at her while doing it anyway, kept silent while her mother said goodbye in French, then gone on, hurrying the words out to catch up with her even as she’d turned and walked from them,

“Just remember, Edwina, it was you who brought it to this. Not us. You made your own decision.”

Burn between her shoulder blades grew as she walked away colder and colder until first at the security gate she could take it no longer and snapped her head around like from a slap for a look back, only by then they’d gone.

It was a slap anyway that she’d gotten from her mother the morning before, twice, left the stinging mark across her cheek faded to a sick yellow tinge today under foundation thick enough to cover. Refusing to go on with the pageants hadn’t been the reason why, nor raised voice reproaching accusations ungrateful little bitch and a throwaway future, bringing at last her father from his office to the kitchen, still not then. Lost her temper at last and invoked the name of JonBenét, that’d done it.

Edwina had shoved past her then, run toward the bedroom door. Her

father’s face had blanched with rage, hand closed hard on her arm until she’d kicked him first in the shin, higher next, shocking his fingers limp enough to tear away from his grasp.

Door locked from the inside, back pressed against the furthest wall as he’d hammered at the door, voice ragged with obscenity. A kimono draped itself over the room’s only chair, whitewashed cane, offered its sleeve to wipe the blood from her splitopen lip. She’d worn it for her last pageant, her very last time, what her mother had dyed her hair for.

Soon the hammering ceased, replaced by her mother’s sobbing voice addressing her through the door—did she understand what she had done with such behavior, godawful insinuations?

Edwina understood.

Silence for hours, then broken by a one-sided conversation louder by intervals coinciding with her mother’s footsteps pacing past the bedroom

door. She spoke in English and called the telephone mother. Edwina was disobedient, incorrigible, showed respect to no one. Spoke lies. Out of control. Her behavior could be tolerated no longer. Of course she understood the difficulty, but this was a last resort, n’est-ce pas, before one otherwise had to consider the possibility of the institution.

Father’s voice after sunset from beyond the door. Grimmer tone than usual as he’d told her. She’d be leaving the next day. Pack a bag, just one, more he wouldn’t bear the expense of. Up by six, and then he’d broken the lock anyway, none of your nonsense now for godsake I’ll have you know but then a call from her mother from the next room. The cane chair longed for a last night pressed beneath the doorknob and broke its back in sacrifice so she sat up the rest of the night to watch for dawn in case it never came.

“Coffee?” asked the flight attendant.

“Tea? Soft drink?”

She shook her head no, she’d be sick again she knew, slid out newspaper and read instead the lead article, pretend an interest in U.S. security measures but couldn’t keep it up longer than the second paragraph.

Sting in the eyes again but damn well nothing to cry about, what she wanted anyway. Besides, her mascara would run and the woman in the next seat might notice. Mustn’t let on, just dust on more powder and keep on smiling.

For God’s sake keep smiling.

Once on the ground, a vast gray fluorescent panorama, wide and dreary land of wet tile and raincoats punctuated by the peaks of the range of luggage carousels. She rescued her own little suitcase, garden print, as it was swept past on a wave of scuffed black rubber just hungering for a snap at her fingers.

Propulsion by innumerable footsteps drowning each other out through passport control, following signs of taxi silhouettes but damn them

to hell it was Canadian money they’d given her. Whirl back now to currency exchange and grimy leather of a backseat taxicab. Stealing sharp rearview glimpses of the driver’s wiry beard and dark dark skin, her own painted nails clutching deadwhite hands against rough rose macramé, the newspaper in her lap folded and refolded until the creases illegible and ink soiled the front of her skirt.

Great gleaming blades of oversized stylist’s shears beckoned from a salon window, and the words pressed forward to be let off here, but no, no hairdresser would consent to cut away enough to free her to the shoulders, and never more.

Brief detour to a drugstore, then dropoff, slink clandestine into bus station bathroom, the outside deserted save one woman with child and the silverhair motorcycle man whose oil eyes slide over, linger too long.

Retreated to the restroom with her suitcase, groped in her handbag for the

scissors she’d just bought, unpackaged already to fit them in, one blade fallen open gave a quick sickening slide across her open palm, a cold metal shock against shantung silk but no real cut.

Spread open newspaper finance page, open stock market secrets in the sink with scissors in hand and unbraided hair. Chill of steel against the skin of her neck sent a shiver through, and the mirror scene flashed for a lightheaded instant. Dark lock pulled taught in her hand, willing the pain to keep her head clear, she raised her hand again.

First cut came as a shock, pain of expectation, but the second took less effort, and soon enough natural, tangle of slick eels fell away and writhed on newspaper under flickering fluorescence to leave her with hair short as a man’s, shimmering blonde at the root.

Rough paper washed away foundation over her bruise but left the

mascara, too harsh black for almost fourteen but seemed fitting somehow, until on with the show, on to the bus. A billboard welcomed her to Ohio to stand judgment on concrete before an old American lady, already sentenced to the color of a dead steel town. Kept her eyes lowered until the cold hand touched her arm, gentle but thank god no caress, and she could look up.

Contributors Cecile Barlier Cecile Barlier was born in France and received her master’s degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris. For over a decade, she has lived in the United States, where she is raising her family and working as an entrepreneur. She has been a regular student and occasional teacher at the Writer’s Studio in San Francisco for a number of years. Cecile’s work has been published in numerous journals and her story, “A Gypsy’s Book of Revelations,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Linda Carela Linda Carela works at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF where she analyzes donor data and provides senior leaders with information regarding donor engagement and giving patterns as well as the external economic and political environment. This data guides decisions that will ultimately help save more children’s lives. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jelly Bucket. She has attended The Writers Studio for four years and studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip Schultz.

Paul Hansom Paul Hansom has an MFA from USC and has been published in venues like New Letters, Storyscape Journal, Chicago Quarterly, So.Cal. Anthology, etc. He has also been nominated for Pushcarts, Sundances, and has actually won, yes won, a PEN-West John Rechy Fellowship.

Jocelyn Locksley Jocelyn Locksley lives in northwest Ohio, where she works at a coffee shop. She also translates from German to English, which she writes about at jocelynlocksley.com. Her other interests include bicycling, film noir, knitting, and attempting to keep at least some of her houseplants alive.

Justin J. Murphy Justin J. Murphy was born in London and raised in Los Angeles. He studied film theory at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has spent his life examining the art of bartending. He enjoys beer, the Los Angeles Lakers, and Redwood trees.

Kitty Oberly Kitty Oberly is a current student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, majoring in Illustration. She enjoys creating art, reading, listening to or creating music, learning about the world, wishing she could make a million graphic novels, trying to write and talking to animals. Her art can be seen anywhere from schools, art galleries and other planets.

Tim Suermondt Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE (The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine (U.K.), and has poems forthcoming in december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly and

Ploughshares. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

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